Carcass
Wake Up and Smell The Carcass (Earache)
by Scott Hefflon
Pillaging the Carcass archives, Earache releases, while perhaps not a best of, at least an overview of Carcass‘ nearly decade-long career of extremity. Not surprisingly, the disc begins at the end and works its way back to the beginning. The effect is that your sensibilities are increasingly attacked or, if you actually take the time to program your CD player to play the tracks in the opposite order, you find your attention wandering the more you listen. If you select random shuffle, just to completely milk your options, you’ll think you’re listening to completely different bands. I doubt I’d be shocking anyone if I generalized by saying Carcass began as a medical dictionary-obsessed death metal band in the late ’80s and sounded it – hyperspeed drumming, non-stop guitar riffing with very little melody, and vocals like a demon throwing up into an echoing toilet bowl. That’s the good stuff. “Exhume to Consume,” from the Grindcrusher comp, “Genital Grinder II,” and “Hepatic Tissue Fermentation” from the Pathological comp represent this period. Leaping to the early ’90s, three songs (tracks 12-14) from the Tools of the Trade EP mark the introduction of surgically-precise producer Colin Richardson, tweaking Carcass’ increasingly melodic roar into a somewhat coherent sound recognizable to latecomer fans. Well, if you stretch your imagination. Tracks 10 and 11 are straight from Heartwork, Columbia/Sony’s brief flirtation with extreme music, and display Carcass’ savage musicianship and knack for distinctive, memorable songwriting. Ditto for tracks 6-9; originally from Heartwork, these tracks were recorded during a Radio 1 session and give the jam-packed riffing a different, less silky-smooth sound. These are the tunes, and you can actually call them tunes, which Carcass is most famous for. Die-hards may say they marked the beginning of the end, but more people are familiar with these songs than any others. So there it is. Depending on your inclination, you could hum these songs. Attempting to sing them in the shower might result in the paramedics being called, but that’s a decision you’ll have to make. Finally, and almost dreadfully, we come to the final stage of Carcass’ illustrious career with the first five tracks of Wake Up And Smell The Carcass – the unreleased songs from Swansong. They mark yet another leap forward in the band’s accessibility. Where Heartwork sounded like the work of post-death fanatics who chuckled wickedly as they wrote Iron-Maiden-shot-up-on-amphetamines songs with a snakespit vocalist with a cynical sense of humor, Swansong was mostly generic metal rhythms spruced up by a talented band that could do so much better, produced to razor sharpness, yet fatally weakened by rebel-yell anthemic lyrics the likes of which Accept, Judas Priest, or Mötley Crüe would’ve written had we not encouraged them to go away. Swansong is a rollercoaster ride of flesh-rending riffs and snarling aggression sprinkled with dreamy, dueling guitar wankery and trite, fist-bangin’ lyrics. So in all, Wake Up And Smell The Carcass achieves what it sets out to; it samples from the many stages of Carcass’ recording history, offers non-commercially released tracks from a variety of time periods, and documents the passage of an influential extreme band. May they rot in pieces.
